IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II.
As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeXAb4u9GWs
"War Against the Weak"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1377395/"Aren't three generations of imbeciles enough?" is a line repeated over and over in this documentary recounting how the Western pseudoscience of eugenics morphed into genocide during World War II. In horrifying detail, "War Against the Weak" explores the scientific climate that led to the extermination of many millions of Jews and other "imbeciles" at the height of the Third Reich. Eugenics, the study of selective breeding, sprang up in the 1860s under the tutelage of Francis Galton, an English scientific wunderkind and half-cousin to Charles Darwin. Roughly 70 years later, it flowered as "racial purity" under Hitler's hand — and it all took root in America. Galton popularized eugenics as a way to rid humanity of disease and defects — such as epilepsy, premature births, retardation and alcoholism — through sterilization. He was under the impression that if such blemishes were not eradicated, humanity would slide down a path to extinction. American eugenicists picked up on Galton's studies and, according to the film, "In the first 70 years of the 20th century, more than 70,000 Americans were eugenically sterilized," mostly women — thousands more were "eugenically separated" into colonies — so they could not further pollute the gene pool with their so-called inferiorities.
"War Against the Weak" is based on the book of the same name by American journalist Edwin Black, the son of Holocaust survivors, who has written three books uncovering the ties between Nazi Germany and American corporate giants such as IBM, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution and General Motors. For instance, in his book, "IBM and the Holocaust," Black details how IBM customized punch cards for Nazi Germany, without which the deportation and extermination of so many people would likely have been impossible to mastermind. In this new film, Black and director Justin Strawhand posit that it was American eugenics studies that Adolf Hitler first latched onto in 1924 while in prison on a treason charge, as he began to construct his political ideology in "Mein Kampf." Hitler took the eugenics thinking one giant step further and applied it to Jews, Gypsies and other people, graduating from sterilization to mass killings.
There's no happy ending to "War Against the Weak." At the close of the film, viewers are reminded that the U.S. government and United Nations helped fund the forced sterilization of nearly 300,000 women in Peru during the 1990s; Australian philosopher Peter Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton, has "called for the right to kill disabled infants up to one month after birth; and in 2007, American Nobel Prize-winner James Watson, who helped discover DNA, claimed that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.
How American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele — and then created the modern movement of "human genetics." In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else.
http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/War Against the Weak: Eugenics
1:03:57 - 2 years ago
Edwin Black discussed his book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, published by Four Walls Eight Windows. The book discusses a large-scale eugenics movement that began in the U.S. in 1904 and that was championed by the nation's medical, political, and religious elite. Eugenics sought to eliminate social "undesirables" and was eventually copied by the Third Reich. Mr. Black responded to questions from members of the audience.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9014940408212321489Aug 14--Ashton Kutcher talks about Eugenics/Rockefeller/War Against the Weak on Bill Maher's show
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq4IL7LU3L4War Against the Weak by Justin Strawhand
(2009, USA, 90 minutes, DVD)
War Against the Weak is a shocking investigation of American eugenics, arguably the most dangerous pseudoscience of all time, which became the largely unknown foundation for Nazi genocide. Even before Hitler’s rise to power, a powerful mix of American corporate, scientific, academic and political elite was formulating a sinister racial and ethnic purification movement that attempted to breed a Nordic master race through the elimination of those deemed physically or mentally unfit. Under the Nazis, eugenic principles were applied without restraint, and with the support of Ivy League scientists funded by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and others. Ingeniously condensed from the book by award-winning journalist Edwin Black, this film is a gripping account of bad science at its worst, and a warning bell in our impending genetic age.
http://www.uniondocs.org/war-against-the-weak/Here Comes the Master Race
WAR AGAINST THE WEAK
Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.
By Daniel J. Kevles Published: October 5, 2003
EUGENICS -- the idea of manipulating human genes to the end of improving individuals, groups or entire populations -- is strongly associated with the Nazi programs of sterilization, euthanasia and genocide. But during the first third of the 20th century, eugenics movements flourished in many nations, including the United States. In the last few years, newspaper articles have called attention to -- and prompted official apologies for -- state-mandated sterilizations done legally to rid society of its alleged human trash, the ''weak'' in the title of Edwin Black's new book, notably in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon and California.
Black is the author previously of ''IBM and the Holocaust,'' a work strongly suggesting that the company, with its punch-card machines, knowingly assisted Hitler's brutalities. His ''War Against the Weak,'' apparently written with similar intent, is a muckraking book about a subject incontestably awash in muck. In the vein of the genre, it is a stew rich in facts and spiced with half-truths, exaggerations and distortions. The most pungent ingredient is its central thesis: eugenic doctrines and policies favoring ''Nordic superiority'' were in fact invented in the United States, were developed in alliance with American wealth and power, and were then exported, inspiring Hitler and achieving their ultimate realization in the Holocaust.
Black pursues his thesis across largely familiar ground -- the eugenic theories that attributed costly physical conditions and socially deleterious behaviors to genetics, accounting for many of them as expressions of ''feeble-mindedness''; the claims in the United States that such deficiencies occurred with particularly high frequency among African-Americans and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe; the respectable standing of eugenic science at leading universities, state agencies and institutions, public interest organizations and research installations, notably the Eugenics Record Office, which was part of what became the department of genetics at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and which was financed in the main by the widow of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman and in part by grants from the Rockefeller philanthropies. Black rightly observes that eugenic research into heredity combined ''equal portions of gossip, race prejudice, sloppy methods and leaps of logic, all caulked together by elements of actual genetic knowledge to create the glitter of a genuine science.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/books/here-comes-the-master-race.html
